ResiliDents: Development and Evaluation of Resilience Module in Dental Undergraduate Curriculum

The Dental profession is among the most stressful professions. This is a concern as high levels of exhaustion and psychological distress have been recorded even in early years postgraduation. Individuals with greater resilience tend to handle stress better. There are still no agreed frameworks with which to promote resilience in the undergraduate curriculum. This study aimed to inform the educational field on developing and evaluating an eLearning module to promote resilience-building competencies in dental undergraduate students in Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland.

A pre-post evaluation was adopted to investigate the effectiveness of an online educational intervention module on the resilience of dental undergraduate students using the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). All students in the latter years of the dental undergraduate programme were recruited as part of their curriculum and opted in for inclusion in the study. Data were analysed using SPSS v.22.

Change in CD-RISC-25 mean score from pre to post-test was positive, increasing from 63.84 (SD = 15.69) to 68.87 (SD = 18.06) by 7.9%; this was not statistically significant. Subscale scores did not change with statistical significance apart from the coping subscale (p < 0.01).

This was the first online eLearning module to be successfully developed with a focus on key topic literature review and engagement of recent graduates to promote development of essential resilience skills in the cohort. Although the results demonstrated no significant changes in outcomes, interventions that enable students to cope and successfully manage stress are needed in the curricula. Further investigation is required to understand the development and retention of such skills in dental undergraduates.